Episodes

Storming the gates with a new wave cover tune, borrowing from Baudelaire and sampling from NASA Apollo transmissions over primitive machine pulses, Swiss pioneers Celtic Frost exploited terrain no metal band had before with their third full-length album. Created under constant stress and duress in......

Many bands have professed to play death metal, but few have summoned the power of death itself, have forced the very bowels of earth to erupt. Nuclear Death, the lords of their own putrid hell-scape, emerged from the sun-scorched wastes of Phoenix, Arizona to ply......

For the second time in a matter of months, your intrepid hosts find themselves in the frosty arms of Trondheim, Norway, this time to investigate the world of the frustratingly private Albino Slug. Known to few but adored by those who do, Albino Slug’s legacy......

After firing up a band called No Man Is An Island (later shortened to No-Man), a young Steven Wilson corralled a couple friends and some wild ideas to sculpt homespun cassette recordings under the strange name Porcupine Tree. These then-obscure tapes, Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm (1989)......

Bust out the Purell and take a healthy dose of penicillin because the whores are back in town. On this special — and occasionally-recurring — episode of Radical Research, we stroll alongside a pornographic buffet of sumptuous synthesizer vibrations. For this globetrotting, sweaty-browed sojourn, we’ll......

For the 45th episode of Radical Research, we continue our trek north, this time landing in Trondheim, Norway, where we take a close look at the vast and fascinating discography of Manes. Well-respected in black metal circles for their personal and visionary approach to the......

When Uranus falls, once and for all, in the cosmic background will be heard the humming, buzzing sound of a tragically-overlooked group of travelers. Formed in 1988 in Turku, Finland, Xysma waged a decade-long war against expectation and small-mindedness. With phantasm-like stealth, the band moved......

After recording two mind-bending and defiant albums — pieced together, ever so precariously, with the bacterial molecules of metal, ska, contemporary music, free jazz, musique concrete, tango, imaginary soundtracks, and the music of the Middle East — Mr. Bungle returned to the table in 1999......

Emerging from a web of poststructuralist philosophy and electronic fetishism, France’s Heldon — whose name is derived from Norman Spinrad novel, The Iron Dream — functioned from 1974–1979 as a vehicle for Richard Pinhas’ wildest aural fantasies. The group’s first six albums work through an......

Welcome to the second installment of this occasional episode in the margins…we have fun trying to fool each other by playing an unlabeled, unmarked piece of music. For diehard Radical Research enthusiasts only! Music cited in this episodeSorry, you’ll need to listen to find out....

Let’s face it: we live in a world bereft of justice. And so it falls on the shoulders of Radical Research to shine a bit of light into this dim world. On this, our 41st episode, we give a voice to the voiceless and spotlight......

Departing from the tractor-beam blasphemy of their seminal first four albums, Bergen, Norway’s Gorgoroth offer a more panoramic approach to (a career in) evil on their daring fifth missive, Incipit Satan. IC absorbs influences from death industrial, morbid rock and roll, and melodic death metal,......

Greetings from the nativity. This podcast began as an examination of the vast and nebulous frontier of Norwegian post-black metal. In that spirit, episode 39 of Radical Research probes the tentacles of the In the Woods… diaspora and gives an ear to Drawn, Stille Opprör,......

Toby Driver’s path to the present has been circuitous and inscrutable, which is to say, in keeping with music he has written over the last 25 years. His work in Maudlin of the Well, Kayo Dot, and as a solo artist has encompassed metal, chamber......

Writing about Devil Doll is like skating about horticulture. Led by the deeply enigmatic Mr. Doctor, and purposely shrouded in the thickest mystery, Devil Doll’s music disappoints even the keenest taxonomist. Experimenting with metal, classical, and progressive rock, Mr. Doctor and his revolving cast of......

Melvins’ career — a vast, still-expanding 36-year odyssey across the full spectrum of heavy and experimental sound — is marked by goalposts, some triumphant, some deviant. On this episode of Radical Research, we train a critical eye on 2002’s bellwether, the curiously-named Hostile Ambient Takeover.......

The so-called “Canterbury scene” was an adventurous musical movement of time and place, bonded tightly by shared influences and an incestuous genealogy. This episode, we climb our favorite limbs from the Canterbury tree, including but not limited to Caravan, National Health, Egg and Quiet Sun.......

It began with suffering and ended with screams (and whispers). St. Louis’ radically-progressive Anacrusis never enjoyed the recognition they so deserved, but popular neglect did little to temper their potent vision. A product not only of the ‘80s thrash scene but also of the fertile......

Men Behaving Badly: Trashed Productions What is music if not sound? In episode 28, we discussed the mathematical properties that have shaped some of rock and metal’s most extraordinary albums. In episode 33 of Radical Research, we expand our investigation into the controversial, often divisive,......

In less than 10 years’ time, Michigan’s maddest scientists, Thought Industry, built a five-album discography that drew upon every available atom and protein in the rock and metal corpora. From the mutated post-thrash of its debut, Songs for Insects, to the melancholy, cosmic vistas of......

Crawling out of Manchester to work strange machinations on the English psych-pop era of the late 1960s, Peter Hammill and Van Der Graaf Generator’s sonic architecture was a mirror to that decade’s creative promise and a murder of its utopian ideals. They documented their deeds......

We here at Radical Research like a good departure. Whether that means the beginning of a vacation or the sixth Journey record, departures are just good for the soul. And so goes the third record by Germany’s Deathrow, Deception Ignored, which constitutes a break from......

As Pythagoras mused, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” So too is there magical energy in the shapely contours of the most mathematical rock music. In this episode of Radical Research, we trace......

A Skeptic’s Universe is what happens when student becomes master. Spiral Architect’s school years were spent in obscurity, honing their craft, learning their lessons, keeping their noses to the grindstone. In 1998 they began work on their master’s thesis, and in early 2000, upon publication,......

Angular, adventurous, and apocalyptic in nearly equal shares, few bands scratch the collective itches of Radical Research like Victoria, British Columbia’s Nomeansno. From their punky beginnings to the nuanced terror of their mature work, Nomeansno trafficked some of the most dangerous and dexterous rock music......

Pytten’s Chamber Music: Black Metal in Grieghallen As the ground began to swell in early ‘90s Norway, a shadowy figure known to metal fans only as “Pytten” (ne Eirik Hundvin) ensconced himself in Bergen’s Grieghallen Studio and began to document the work of the country’s......

Emerging from the swampy wastes of Florida, Nasty Savage created a body of work built on the inimitable vocals of Ronnie Galetti (aka Nasty Ronnie), hammering percussion, and a harmonic guitar language that has yet to be replicated. This episode of Radical Research takes a......

This game originates from one Jeff plays semi-regularly with our pal Tim Hammond, where CD-Rs fly back and forth between the Boros (States and Greens), and one has to puzzle out the other’s mystery tracks. It’s been an effective way to both discover new stuff......

It would be inaccurate to say that Germany’s Pyogenesis is underrated because, in fact, they have hardly ever been rated at all. Over the course of their career – which is still in process – Pyogenesis worked across a wide swath of genres, including death/doom......

Meet the creatures Plotkin & Dubin, instigators of some of the most beguiling music ever beamed to Earth from a New Jersey-shaped quasar. Like the guy in the petri dish on the Musical Dimensions… album cover, your puzzled Radical Research hosts consider the bizarre landscape......

From the dark past, in the light of freezing moons and through funeral fog, Mayhem reappeared in 1997, under cover of night and to relatively little fanfare. Wolf’s Lair Abyss, the band’s first release since 1994’s epochal De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, reveals a fiercer, future-forward......

Goodbye clarity, hello obfuscation… Norway’s other post-black metal duo, perhaps dwelling deeper in obscure shadows than Solefald… we hail Fleurety’s dedication to the dark arts and… which craft? All the ones that bring metal to the most precarious of left-field edges. So bizarre that it......

From a kernel to a cosmos. Over the course of a decade and beyond, Germany’s Grobschnitt twisted and bent and stretched a piece of sound that would be known as “Solar Music.” An alchemical collision of Prog, Krautrock, psychedelia, and uncanny theater, “Solar Music” represents......

The second in an occasional series of brief ambushes. With this mini-episode, we ponder and marvel at similarities between a certain few musical passages. Prompted by our previous episode on Afflicted, we compare/contrast moments of uncanny similarity, one of which is too close for comfort.......

Prolific for a brief few years, with curious beginnings and a mostly ignored ending, Afflicted’s supernova burned brightly at its peak. That peak, Prodigal Sun, is the essential cornerstone of Afflicted’s output and is explored in depth here. Psychedelic, transcendent left-field death metal lunacy from......

Few things in life get the hosts of Radical Research as excited as the squishy, otherworldly sounds of the analog synthesizer. For our 16th episode, a special detour from our typical musings, we sort through the decades in search of some of the deepest, wildest,......

Can you sense them? The ghosts? Quiet yourself for a moment. They hang in the air and whisper in our ears. They taunt us with memories of a golden age. Listen closely and you can hear the spectral voice: “1993.” They mock the sterility and......

Had Leif Endling disbanded Candlemass after 1989’s Tales of Creation, he would have given enough to place his band in the halls of metal infamy. But the bassist pressed on, enduring lineup shifts, label hassles, and changing times, to eventually arrive in the late ‘90s......

There are no happy accidents or lucky mistakes in Rick Rubin productions. The legendary producer knows exactly what he wants and how to get the leanest, meanest performances from each artist he works with. In our examples, he wielded a decisive guiding hand in helping......

For our 12th installment, your intrepid hosts sift through time and dust in search of Orange County’s Mind Over Four. Bridging an unknown gulf between cutting edge alternative rock and hyperkinetic tech/prog metal, Mind Over Four was poised for a breakthrough to the mainstream. But......

Death metal is very weird musick. It’s the rupturing and restructuring of musical tradition. At its best it offers otherworldly, phantasmagoric deliverance. We begin this episode hearing Carbonized in its embryonic stages as an exemplar of the peculiar Swedish death metal substrata, but in short......

The 10th installment of the Radical Research odyssey pries into the amorphous body of work that has been known to your hosts privately as “Ginncore.” Based around a loosely-connected confederacy of artists — mostly American and mostly active during the difficult-to-define ‘00s — Ginncore has......

Rock Progressivo Italiano (RPI) was a remarkably fertile, prolific progressive rock movement of the 1970s. Italy’s compositional and performance acumen rivaled England’s more popular scene, and its output exceeded it. Your Radical Research hosts are mad for the stuff, and with our ninth episode, we......

Join us on an extended tour through the curious world of Norway’s Beyond Dawn. For thirteen years, Beyond Dawn occupied a shadowy, distorted universe of their own making. Rather than scowl at the moon, Beyond Dawn chased phantoms through pitiless cityscapes and fairytale grottos in......

Wishful Dreaming: A Study of My Dying Bride’s Urban Detour Join Radical Research hosts Jeff Wagner and Hunter Ginn in a spirited discussion on the fifth album from English death/doom maestros My Dying Bride. 34.788%…Complete was met with quizzical confusion upon its release in 1998,......

Band in the Trees: Among the Ruins of Die Kreuzen Episode 6 of Radical Research finds your intrepid hosts deep-diving into the discography of Milwaukee’s cult heroes, Die Kreuzen. Over the span of a decade, Die Kreuzen created four records that propose a hostile challenge......

Radical Research 5.5 is the first in an occasional series of brief ambushes. Super-trivial stuff that’s too fun, weird and/or interesting to ignore, but undeserving of a full episode. For Radical Research diehards only! Music cited in order of appearance: Nuclear Death – “A Dark......

Ten blasts of springtime joy before the scorch of summer. This is the Radical Research strain of fusion, corralling some of the baddest asses within the larger prog/jazz/fusion/rock heliosphere. From NYC giants Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, we veer into decidedly deadly territory through......

Episode 4 of Radical Research explores the surreal work of Austrian metalunatics, Disharmonic Orchestra.* Our conversation exposes the psychic tensions and psychedelic grottos of this extraordinary band, one whose music was ignored largely during its heyday and continues, for the most part, to be bereft......

Episode 3 of Radical Research covers three progressive rock bands from the glorious ‘70s era that often don’t come up in the usual ‘70s prog conversations. But they should, and this is our little way of correcting that. Please drop your prejudices and Yes albums,......

The second episode of Radical Research dives into the strange world of Sweden’s Dan Swanö. From his neo-prog roots in Unicorn to the way-left-of-center Karaboudjan, and bedrocks Edge of Sanity and Pan-Thy-Monium, we are usually in awe. Swanö has also been a crucial cog in......

For the inaugural episode of Radical Research, we delve into the mysterious, magnificent William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998), the fourth album by Norwegian shape-shifters Ulver. Note: The sound quality of RR1 isn’t exactly superb, especially Jeff’s mic in the intro. This......